Sometimes you read a book and bits of it stick in your mind years and years later — but you can't remember the title, the author, or enough details to place it. We've tried our best to help out when this problem strikes. But there's actually a whole online community devoted to just this problem — What Was That Book? over at Livejournal. They're dedicated to helping people identify the books that only exist as scraps in their minds, and it's quite inspirational to watch.

Plus rather a lot of the books they talk about are science fiction or fantasy. Sample ones include:

80's or 90's Time travel in a cave/room... It centers around a room that can travel through time, popping up at different points in time. The people in the room are all trying to get back to their actual time periods. These people are trying to deal with day to day survival and eat so they'll leave the room. The problem is that the room will randomly leave. I distinctly remember the room was getting ready to leave a cave it'd settled into, and some people got left behind.

The book would have been written and/or published between the 1960s and the 1980s. It's a post-apocalyptic children's novel, featuring a pair of siblings: an older sister and a younger brother. It may have been set in England. She remembers little else about the book other than that there were no parents, and when the siblings had to leave their home, they had to take drinking water with them from the tank on their toilet.

[This] space adventure was a sort of cruise ship in space thriller, where an asteroid severely damaged the ship. The bridge was destroyed (the narrative was quite detailed in this part; it mentioned how the bridge waited until the captain had reached the exit first, before they tried to run too, but they all died anyway) and the highest ranking official was the ship's doctor, who then had to figure out how to look after the injured, get an oxygen source for the survivors and fight off a disease brought aboard by the asteroid.

It's sort of addictive reading, partly because it gives you little insights into what sticks in people's minds about stories they read years ago. Plus you can help these people figure out which books they're remembering! [What Was That Book]